The extravagant and erring spirit. (Said of a spirit wandering from the bounds of purgatory. Shakespeare: Hamlet)

The modesty of nature. (Shakespeare: Hamlet)

It is a nipping and an eager air. (Shakespeare: Hamlet)

Security

Is mortals' chiefest enemy. (Shakespeare: Macbeth)
Most admired disorder. (Shakespeare: Macbeth)

Upon this hint I spake.

(From the account of the wooing of

Desdemona. Shakespeare: Othello) This Lodovico is a proper man. (Shakespeare: Othello)

A very handsome man.

Mice and rats and such small deer. (Shakespeare: King Lear) This is no sound

That the earth owes. (Shakespeare: The Tempest) Every shepherd tells his tale. (Milton: L'Allegro) Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies. (Rathe survives only in the comparative form rather. Milton: Lycidas) Can honor's voice provoke the silent dust? (Gray: Elegy) The silly buckets on the deck. (Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner)

4. In technical usage or particular phrases a former sense of a word may be embedded like a fossil. The italicized words in the following list retain special senses of this kind. What do these words as thus used mean? Can you add to the list?

To wit

Might and main
Time and tidel
Christmastide

Sad bread

A bank teller

To tell one's beads &

Aid and abet

Meat and drink
Shoplifter
Fishing-tackle

Getting off scot-free

An earnest of future favors
A brave old hearthstone
Confusion to the enemy!
Giving aid and comfort to
the enemy

Without let or hindrance

A let in tennis
Quicklime

Cut to the quick
Neat-foot oil

To sound in tort (Legal
phrase)

To bid one Godspeed

I had as lief as not

The child favors its par

ents

On pain of death
Widow's weeds 1

I am bound for the Prom-
ised Land

To carry a girl to a party

(Used only in the South) To give a person so much to boot.

5. Each of the subjoined phrases contradicts itself or repeats

its idea clumsily. The key to the difficulty lies in the italicized words. What is their true meaning?

V

INDIVIDUAL WORDS: AS MEMBERS OF
VERBAL FAMILIES

OUR investigation into the nature, qualities, and for

tunes of single words must now merge into a study of their family connections. We do not go far into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career of a word may be very complicated. Most people, if you asked them, would tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity-a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate. They would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human. Some rise in the world, some sink; some start along the road of grandeur or

obliquity, and then backslide or reform. Some are social climbers, and mingle in company where verbal dress coats are worn; some are social degenerates, and consort with the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of language. Some marry at their own social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny. And if you trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.

It is contrary to nature for a word, as for a man, to live the life of a hermit. Through external compulsion or internal characteristics a word has contacts with its fellows. And its most intimate, most spontaneous associations are normally with its own kindred.

In our work hitherto we have had nothing to say of verbal consanguinity. But we have not wholly ignored its existence, for the very good reason that we could not. For example, in the latter portions of Chapter IV we proceeded on the hypothesis that at least some words have ancestors. Also in the analysis (page 72 ff.) of the dictionary definition of tension we learned that the word has, not only a Latin forebear, but French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian kinsmen as well. One thing omitted from that analysis would have revealed something further-namely, that the word has its English kinfolks too. For the bracketed part of the dictionary definition mentions two other English words, tend and tense, which from their origin involve the same idea as that of tension -the idea of stretching.

Now words may be akin in either of two ways. They may be related in blood. Or they may be related by marriage. Let us consider these two kinds of connection more fully.

Words Related in Blood

As an illustration of blood kinships enjoyed by a native English word take the adjective good. We can easily call to mind other members of its family: goodly, goodish, goody-goody, good-hearted, good-natured, good-humored, good-tempered, goods, goodness, goodliness, gospel (good story), goodby, goodwill, goodman, goodwife, good-fornothing, good den (good evening), the Good Book. The connection between these words is obvious.

Next consider a group of words that have been naturalized: scribe, prescribe, ascribe, proscribe, transcribe, circumscribe, subscriber, indescribable, scribble, script, scripture, postscript, conscript, rescript, manuscript, nondescript, inscription, superscription, description. It is clear that these words are each other's kith and kin in blood, and that the strain or stock common to all is scribe or (as sometimes modified) script. What does this strain signify? The idea of writing. The scribes are a writing clan. Some of them, to be sure, have strayed somewhat from the ancestral calling, for words are as wilful—or as independent-as men. Ascribe, for example, does not act like a member of the household of writers, whatever it may look like. We should have to scrutinize it carefully or consult the record for it in that verbal Who's Who, the dictionary, before we could understand how it came by its scribal affiliations honestly. But once we begin to